Spence was about to answer when the door of the office swung open and Tommy trooped in, strutting about like a rooster who’d just spent the afternoon in the henhouse. “You’ll never guess what I did?” He beamed as he glanced back and forth between Andy, who was still wearing the bemused expression Spence’s appearance had brought on, and a young woman who knew not only that she was where she belonged, but that she was in her own very unique way as important as either of the men she’d come to think of as more than coworkers. Even as Tommy took to crowing about the coup he’d managed to pull off in Vegas, for the first time in a long time, Karen Spencer realized she was home.
BEAUTY AND THE GEEK: THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
Like everything else, Web-based social media networks can be used and abused for all kinds of nefarious reasons, ranging from cyberbullying to blackmail. This story was inspired by a 2013 case of “sextortion” involving Cassidy Wolf, Miss Teen USA 2013. According to the FBI report concerning this case, the webcam that was part of a computer in her bedroom was hacked and used to take photos of her while she was in a serious state of undress. The hacker is then alleged to have engaged in extortion, threatening to make public the photos he’d taken of Miss Wolf if she did not meet his demands.
The effect on the victims of such acts can be devastating. An eighteen-year-old high school student named Jessie Logan hanged herself in her bedroom when her former boyfriend posted nude photos of her to hundreds of their fellow students, resulting in cyberbullying and social ostracizing that became intolerable for Jessie.
At first this story was going to involve a case of a mother whose daughter was a contestant in a beauty pageant blackmailing the competition by posting doctored images of those girls on various social media websites. In discussing the story, my Anglo-Irish coconspirator and I decided to shift the setting to the cutthroat world of high fashion, which, in our opinion, was ripe with all sorts of possibilities. This includes making this story something of a cautionary tale, one centered on the vulnerabilities people open themselves up to when they live their life on social media.
HAROLD COYLE
BEAUTY AND THE GEEK: THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND THE STORY
You would be amazed at just how many people use passwords that are shockingly common. Research from multiple sources shows that about one third of all Internet users’ passwords or PINs can be guessed from a list of twenty to twenty-five, a list that hasn’t changed much in the last three years. For those of you who are now worried that your “life password” is not as secure as you thought it might be, I suggest you search online for “most common passwords” or read the annual report that Splashdata produces of their research.
The techniques available to Spence to legally track and identify Tracy Ireland’s adversary are numerous. The one used here, that of stylometry, was originally developed to enable academics to ascribe unknown literary works to known historical authors. It is the use of specialist algorithms to analyze text in order to identify the writing “fingerprints” for a particular writer. As you can imagine, the works of William Shakespeare have been repeatedly analyzed. From those early beginnings many recognized the potential of stylometry in other areas, identifying plagiarism or tracking down anonymous blog posters being two of the more common, and the tools available have become more sophisticated and more accurate.
If you are interested, there are a number of online stylometry tools to try out (such as the one that will try to guess your gender), or you can download an open-source program such as the very capable JGAAP or Signature toolsets.
JENNIFER ELLIS
THE HAUNTED PORT
1
At first Gerdi Vanderloo did not take much notice of a red and yellow truck hauling an empty trailer as it slowly made its way between the stacks of containers waiting to be picked up or loaded onto ships. It wasn’t until the truck turned onto a quay and stopped next to an empty berth that he started to pay attention to it. Curious as to what the driver was doing there, Vanderloo leaned forward and focused on one of a dozen monitors he and the other employees of Antwerp’s port authority responsible for security relied upon to track the comings and goings of people, vehicles, and cargo within the port area.
“He’s lost,” the shift supervisor muttered as he watched Vanderloo switch from one CCTV camera to another in order to read the license plate of the truck.
“I expect that’s so,” Vanderloo muttered when he saw the truck was from the UK. “Still, I’d better have someone go out there and find out what he’s about.”
Had they not been warned to keep an eye open for unusual goings-on about the port area due to an ever-increasing number of containers being reported missing, Vanderloo’s supervisor would have told him to ignore the truck. But like Vanderloo, he wasn’t about to jeopardize his job by turning a blind eye to what was, in his mind, an obvious case of a Brit driver being either too proud or too stubborn to seek directions from a foreigner. The supervisor for the port’s security personnel assigned to the graveyard shift, and responsible for keeping an eye on things during the wee hours of the morning when everyone’s guard was down, liked his job. The idea of being cast out of the port’s central control room, where it was warm and dry, and reassigned to one of the patrols that roamed the port area day and night, rain or shine, or posted at one the of cramped booths located at every gate leading into and out of the port was not one he relished. So he said nothing as Vanderloo leaned forward and spoke into the mike that linked the port’s security personnel all safely nestled in the warm, well-lit control room to the officers whose job it was to the make sure there was nothing untoward going on in the dark shadows of containers stacked as high as a six-story building.
With his partner making his way cautiously along the left side of the British truck and his hand resting on the butt of his holstered pistol, Maurice Simenon advanced toward the driver’s door. When he reached it, Simenon took a moment to study the driver who, by all appearances, was sound asleep with his head resting on a jacket wedged between him and the door window. Despite the innocence of the scene, Simenon knew better than to let his guard down. So he tapped twice on the door with the knuckles of his left hand while tightening his grip on his pistol.
With a start, the driver jerked his head away from the door and gave it a quick shake before looking down at Simenon through the window.
Using his left hand, Simenon signaled the driver to lower his window.
“What’s the problem?” the driver asked even before he had his window all the way down.
“Could you step down from the truck,” Simenon replied in a manner that alerted Sean Farrell, a fifteen-year veteran driver for Northumberland Haulage, that the officer’s question was not a request.
Though he was not at all pleased at the prospect of leaving the comparative warmth of his truck’s cab and standing about in the damp, chilly early morning air, Farrell knew better than to argue with a man who had his hand wrapped around the butt of a pistol. That they were bona fide port security officers was a given. Besides having nothing of value other than his lorry to steal at the moment, not even the cheekiest hijacker would dare make a move on a truck this far into the port area that was parked in a well-lit area Farrell assumed was covered by multiple CCTV cameras. So he complied, taking his time to open his door and climb down lest he spook the officer.